


Others find peace of mind in pretending, couldn’t you?

by middlemarch



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, WandaVision (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Family, Meta, Season 1, Siblings, Trauma, post episode 6, sitcoms, who's the show-runner for Wandavision?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 09:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29416314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: "And if the things we dream aboutDon't happen to be so,That's just an unimportant technicality."-- Jerome KernWanda gets asked a question she's unprepared to answer or have you ever considered a coffee-shop AU, Maximoff?
Relationships: Pietro Maximoff & Wanda Maximoff, Wanda Maximoff/Vision
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36





	Others find peace of mind in pretending, couldn’t you?

“You don’t wish you were somewhere else?” the person-who-called-himself-Pietro said. Wanda knew she shouldn’t keep thinking of him that way, but she’d spent such a long time thinking of him only in the little, lightless creases of the day and he’d never been the way he was now, laughing as long as this Pietro laughed, as if it didn’t cost him anything. As if he’d never been hungry. When she scraped the plates after dinner, he never opened his mouth to ask her to stop. To save.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, keeping one eye on the boys, one hand consciously unclenched from the fist it wanted to be, glowing red as a cigarette’s tip.

“Regrets, ever heard of ‘em?” the person-she-had-to-call-Pietro said and grinned. “I mean, Wanda, no offense, but we could be in a coffee shop with a funky yellow velvet sofa and there’d be a terrible waitress who always forgets my order in a short skirt and an apron and Docs, carrying tureens of coffee. Good coffee, well, better than Folgers. And chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. Yours, not Vision’s, his is huge.”

“A coffee shop?” She didn’t say, _what about the boys_ because she was seeing herself there, Vision next to her with his arm resting along the curve of the sofa’s back and hell, maybe Natasha, glaring at a polka-dotted mug like it had insulted her, and Bruce with his soft, dark eyes, his soft, bitter smile. Agnes, complaining about some nonsense from her office that made her late, spreadsheets when she just wanted to be spread across sheets, if-you-know-what-I-mean-Wanda-honey.

“Or a bar—you know, like a cozy neighborhood place where everybody’d know your name, call it out when you came in, _Wanda!_ And we could get a decent drink or at least a beer, whatever’s on draft and there’d be a dart-board, a pool table in the back,” the person-who-was-terribly-like-and-terribly-unlike-Pietro said. A drink, a cold beer or a finger, no, two fingers of Scotch on the rocks and a bowl of peanuts, that was what she could have had. Vision perched on the bar-stool next to her, his lips parted so she could toss in the shelled peanuts, then lick the salt from her thumb while he swallowed. There’d be a payphone that rang and rang, one you never had to pick up unless you wanted to.

“The sky’s the limit, when you think about it,” the person-she’d-thought-must-be-Pietro-because-what-choice-did-she-have? said. “An airport, one of those little regional ones on an island, we could fly. Vision would be the reliable pilot and I’d be the wild one. You could run the lunch counter and keep us from fighting. Or an ER, we could be a bunch of zany docs and all that wool-gathering you do, you know, when you sort of space out and Vis gets a little distracted, well, there’d be a reason—shenanigans. Musical numbers. Tap-dancing. The whole nine yards.”

“You don’t think this is enough?” Wanda said, letting the sound of the happy-children and the happy-parents and the happy-neighbors wash over her, aware of Vision walking further and further away, Tommy whizzing around and Billy calling after him. Agnes, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for a light to turn green. The Pietro-she’d-forced-herself-to-accept raised an eyebrow, something her brother had always been able to do, which made her wonder, and then he smiled, his teeth very white, very even.

“Hey sis, I’m just saying, it’s a big world. Novi Grad, Lagos, New York—and here we are, in little old Westview—”

“I’m happy here,” Wanda snapped. 

“You’re happy here,” he repeated, in a voice that had to be Pietro’s. It had to be because it was.

Because she was, it had to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Make Believe" by Jerome Kern.


End file.
